One
of Sir Andrew’s most famous sea battles was in
1490. It began in the Firth of Forth and ended next day off
the
River Tay, the numerically superior English force having been
overwhelmed and
their vessels captured. It was said that minstrels celebrated
throughout
Europe with the following lay:

“The
Scotsmen fought like lions bold, And
many English slew; The
slaughter that they
made that day The
English folk shall rue. The
battle fiercely it was fought Near
the craig of Basse; When
next we fight the English loons, May
naewaur come to
pass.”

Wynd House

The
current owners of Wynd House in the borough of
Elie in Fife are descendants of Admiral Sir Andrew Wood, the famous
15th
century merchant seaman.William Wood
bought the house in 1650.

The
Wood
family later set up a merchant bank in Glasgow and in 1828 another
William Wood
left Scotland for New York to set up the branch there.Although he lived the rest of his life in New
York, his thoughts would often return to Fife.In 1861, as an elderly man, he penned a poem Thoughts
on Elie lamenting:

"The
dear old house in Elie,
Oh! would
that I were thereClose by the southern
window,
In the quaint morocco chair."

Wynd
House has been owned by descendants
of William Wood ever since, even though they have always lived in
America.But the current owner of Wynd
House, John
Walter Wood, reversed the westward trend of Woods when he settled in
Britain
after marrying an Irishwoman, Charlotte Cusack Jobson.

The Wood Potters of Staffordshire

Early
in the 18th century, there were three brothers -
Ralph, Aaron and Moses Wood – in the town of Burslem in Staffordshire:

Ralph
“the miller of Burslem,” was the
eldest, born in 1715.He achieved renown
round about 1750 with his Staffordshire figures, and especially his
Toby Jugs.

Aaron,
born in 1717, was the finest mould maker in the Staffordshire
potteries.
He was also the father of the even more celebrated Enoch, whose fame
rested not
only upon his great skill as a modeller but also on his ability as a
potter.

and
from Moses, the third of the three
brothers, can be traced the beginning of an unbroken succession of
seven
generations of Master Potters.

Enoch
Wood was a man of great enterpriser whose
craftsmanship and flair for invention served to build up the
considerable
business which began in 1790 and continued through his life as his
wares became
more sought after, especially in America.He lived into his eighty-third year and died in 1840.

Absalom Wood, a
descendant of Moses, founded a new Wood pottery business in 1865.His company flourished and was employing
around 1,000 workers at his Burslem plant in 1910.It continued to operate until 1981.

John Wood of
Glossop

The Wood name had been recorded in the Glossop parish
records in Derbyshire since 1620.But
this John Wood had been born at Gatehead near Marsden in Yorkshire in
1785, the
son of John Wood, a wool clothier, and his wife Betty.

John had lived in Manchester and Liverpool
before arriving in Glossop around the year 1815.A
story went around that when he arrived in Glossop
he was so poor that he could not afford either a pair of clogs or
shoes, but
that he had one of each on his feet.This
does not seem likely.

He
got his start
in Glossop at the age of thirty when he rented two idle cotton mills
there, the
Thread mill and the Old Water mill.His
business boomed and he started to acquire mills.His
Howardtown mills became the
largest spinning and weaving combine in Glossop and he was to dominate
the
Derbyshire cotton industry.

He
was a careful and mindful owner.In 1830
the spinners in the district went out
on strike and there was rioting.The
soldiers
who were brought in to calm the situation were billeted at one of
Wood’s
mills.So careful was Wood that no fire
should take place owing to the carelessness of the soldiers that he
slept many
times in the room where the bales of cotton were stowed.

His
company John Wood & Sons was continued
by his sons after his death in 1854.

Michael Woods and Woods' Gap

Michael
Woods had originally come to Pennsylvania in 1724
with his brother William and widowed sister Elizabeth.He had married Mary Campbell and they reportedly
had eleven children (of which six were recorded in his will when he
died).

In
1734 he led a group of 25-30 sturdy pioneers across the Blue Ridge
Mountains
into the Shenandoah valley of Virginia, a trek of some 200 miles.They are believed to have been the first
whites ever to have goneon that route via an old Indian trail that
became known
as Woods' Gap (so designated in 1757).

Woods
subsequently took up large land
holdings within the vicinity of Woods’ Gap.The original name of his plantation was Mountain Plain.The Mountain Plain church, built in 1747, was
put up on part of his land.His wife
Mary had been murdered by Indians in 1742.Woods himself died at Mountain Plain in 1762.

His
niece Magdalena who died in 1800 lived to
be ninety years old.She was noted by contemporaries as being a strikingly
beautiful woman with blond hair and possessing great charm.She was often seen astride a famous black
stallion, wearing a hunter’s green riding cloak with gold buttons and a
bonnet
with many plumes.

The
Rev. Neander Woods, a descendant of this family who was born in 1844,
asserted
in his 1905 book The Woods-McAfee
Memorial that Michael Woods was a descendant of the Cromwellian
soldier Sir
John Woods in Ireland.Others have
suggested a Scots Irish origin.

He
also
said that Magdalena was by the 1750’s (because of her second marriage
to Benjamin
Borden) the richest woman west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.Maybe that was the family gossip but it was
probably
not true.

Fernando Wood
of New York

Fernando
Wood’s line began in America in 1670 when Henry
Wood, a Welsh Quaker and carpenter, arrived with his family at Newport,
Rhode
Island.He did well in the new country
and later settled in New Jersey with a substantial landholding at
Peashore near
present-day Camden.

Over
the next three
generations, the family fortunes declined.Henry Wood fought in the Revolutionary War, but this caused a
break with
his Quaker brethren.His son Benjamin
struggled unsuccessfully in various businesses in Philadelphia in the
early
1800’s.

From
this humdrum background
came Fernando Wood, born in Philadelphia in 1812, with his unusual
Spanish
forename having been chosen by his mother from a character in an
English gothic
novel.

Making
his way in New York, the
dapper Wood was first a bar owner who then bought ships and made a
fortune in
California.He
retired from business in the 1850’s to
devote himself to politics.He was the
“Grand Sachem” of Tammany Hall from 1850 to 1856 and elected the Mayor
of New
York in 1857.He proved to be a colorful
figure in the rough-and-tumble of New York politics over the next
decade.

At
the time of the Civil War, he was brash,
often opposing Lincoln’s actions.He was
in reality a known provocateur if he thought he could get away with it.His brother Benjamin was less subtle.He was editor of New York Daily News, which
was closed for abetting treason in 1861-62, and a strong anti-War
Democrat.Fernando himself survived being
on the losing
side in the War and continued to represent New York in Congress until
his death
in 1881.